Suppose you have a little game company. Instead of making software, you knock out three or four clever games every few months. You can't invent all the games yourself. So you go out and hire a game designer to invent games. You are going to pay the game designer $6,000 a month to invent new games. Those games will be clever and novel. They are patentable. It is important to you, as a company, to own the patents on the games.

Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, he sues you, claiming that he owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when he wasn't on duty.

Ooops. That's not what you meant. You wanted to pay him for all the games that he invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying for him may happen at any time... on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.

So before you hire this guy, you agree, "hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it's impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don't just want to buy your 9-5 inventions. I want them all, and I'm going to pay you a nice salary to get them all," and he agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all his inventions belong to the company as long as he is employed by the company.

Robin Wauters from TechCrunch is reporting that when the app was first submitted to Apple for approval, Opera claimed being completely certain of 100% compliance with the App Store policies. Apparently they were right.

uganson writes: Following on the recent discussion on How To Avoid the Infection of Botnet?, I ask my fellow Slashdotters, what are the common sense and usual general measures to detect bot infections? I mean, not having any particular suspicion of being infected, what are the symptoms of infection to look for, or being aware of?

When not looking for any particular instance of bot, are sophisticated bots able to remain stealth enough, that even a tech savvy user would remain unaware of an infection?

I'm looking in particular for measures that a user can apply in its home computer/network, or laptop. I guess business networks would implement more elaborated intrusion detection systems that are usually off reach for a home user.

General housekeeping measures I use include: Up to date antivirus (of course), periodic system scans with anti malware detectors, checking bandwith usage graphs on the firewall, look for strange process names.

gertin writes: Opera has now released their final build of 10.50 for Windows (builds for Mac and Linux will follow soon), after doing 5 release candidates in less than 36 hours. The reason for the fast development cycle is presumably because Opera wanted to get their new version out in time for Microsofts browser ballot screen, which is being pushed out soon. The company is claiming that the new version is the "fastest browser ever". Benchmarks of the beta done by Opera and ZDNet supports this claim, and showed that even the beta was leading over other browsers in most cases. How the final version compares remains to be seen.

This is actually fairly common style with Korean MMO's and multiplayer games. It seems to work good there and players like it, so it's not a surprise companies want to try it on western markets too.

I agree. It is a game model I don't like, so I stay away from those kind of games.

When I started playing BFH, this was the main selling point for me. It was a very bold claim, but they said it everywhere. It is on the official trailer. It is on the official FAQ (now updated). They said it in several interviews. Now, I feel cheated.

The problem with EA/DICE right now is the dishonesty they have shown. They made this change without a warning. They did a BattleFunds sale and bundles offers in other equipment in the weeks prior to this change. Many people who spent BFs this weekend on these items have found now that they have to unexpectedly spend more money to use them.

And they completely continue to miss the point of all the complaining users. They say that the game is still free, and that you can still have fun without paying a penny. The point is that they destroyed the very core claim of not giving combat advantage to paying customers, and backstabbed the whole user community in the process. Still, no one in the dev/mods team has actually acknowledged it.

rotide writes: EA has attempted to join the "Free to Play" online game scene with the fun and ambitious Battlefield: Heroes online shoter. Unfortunately they appear to have fallen short of their own goals as they now feel it necessary to force their customers to purchase in game weapons to stay competitive on the battlefield. Not selling items to give you a distinct advantage was once their Cardinal Rule, but it appears even those rules are expendable when there is profit to be had.